The social implications of neuroscience and a fantastic essay by Zadie Smith

When my blog site is upgraded (I am told ‘it is only a matter of time’) I will be able to link to some of my own favorite sites. One that I discovered only recently is ‘The Frontal Cortex’. It’s a great site which focuses on one of my own main interests – the social implications of neuroscience.  

What particularly attracted me was a post from the site’s author Jonah Lehrer about a fantastic recent essay in the New York Review of Books by Zadie Smith. In the essay Smith contrasts two novels – one the best selling and highly acclaimed Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, the other Tom McCarthy’s avant garde masterpiece (according to Smith), Remainder. The question posed by Smith in a piece that combines forensic critique with barely suppressed rage at the persistence of the conventions of novel writing, is why it is that the mythical world of lyrical realism has such a grip on us. Smith’s questioning is made more poignant because she is herself an exponent of exactly the form of writing she is critiquing.  

In this sense Smith’s piece is a classical restatement of the modernist question? Why is it that we accept the way the world is portrayed in conventional realism as if it really is how the world is? Lehrer usefully makes the link between Smith and Virginia Woolf’s classic essay "Modern Fiction": 

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being "like this". Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old 

As Lehrer goes on to say:

“Woolf doesn't name drop neurons, but instead uses the language of contemporary science ("impressions," sensory "atoms"). The connection between this Smith essay and Woolf's modernist manifesto becomes even more explicit when Smith goes on to consider the flaws of realism (as represented by Netherland). She compares the depiction of reality in "realistic" literature to the flux of self-conscious experience, ridiculing the strict constraints of 21st century realism just as Woolf had mocked "Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy" in 1925, for never grappling with the disorder of "human nature". 

Netherland doesn't really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?'

Earlier this year in my annual essay - notable for the fact it has been read or watched even fewer times that my blog has been read (yes I know self pity is ugly but in my case I can promise it is authentic) – I asked what might happen when greater awareness of brain science made it more difficult for us to maintain the myths of Western selfhood? In responding David Willetts questioned whether ‘knowing’ something scientifically, but which is counter intuitive, always changes the way we see and act. For example, he said, we know the sun doesn’t ‘rise’, it is the earth that turns but that doesn’t change either how we talk about it or how we see it. 

The irony of the lyrical realist novel is that far from persisting because it describes reality it gets its power from reinforcing the myth of a separate, continuous, Cartesian self.  

PS In yesterday’s blog I asked whether the ban on smoking in public places will reduce smoking overall. Mike Bury e-mails me to point out figures showing an unprecedented decline of 400,000 in the number of smokers since the ban was introduced. As you say, Mike, it’s a triumph for progressive paternalism

• matt grist - 25 Nov 2008 1:40pm

  Writing is about honesty. If a writer is dishonest she is nothing. This is Smith's real beef: that Netherland is dishonest in that it has fallen into a realistic style, rather than being honest about what it's really like to experience the world in the twenty-first century. As far as I can see, she only uses the term 'neural route' to connote the idea that fiction forges new experiential routes in readers (or brings to light ones already in existence but not yet articulated). Her point is then that when fiction gets stuck in certain such routes it cannot serve this imagination-expanding function. As for the connection with Woolf: at one level this is just what I have said above; Woolf is worried about 'set' and limited ways of experiencing the world which block the writer from being honest about how experience feels from the inside (as it were). But on another level, the connection is more tenuous. Surely Woolf is railing in part against a kind of positivism (perhaps echoed in some trite strands in neuroscience) that interprets what is really experienced in terms of what is real in science (hence, as the comment above highlights, Woolf thought it heavy-handed and reductive to think of experienced time in terms of clock-time - as did Heidegger, by the way.) Smith's problem with realism is obviously different - it is not the novel versus crass positivism or the 'common sense' the latter might inform, it is a style of novel-writing versus what it's actually like to experience the world in the twenty first century.

• Michael in UK - 20 Nov 2008 8:55am

  I read the both essays last night, the Changing Minds project sounds excellent, and the Zadie Smith essay is just terrific - thanks very much for sharing.

• C Sherrington - 19 Nov 2008 3:20am

  In my own experience, it seems that questions about what is actually real are found in the urban, abstract context and less so in the rural one. The aspect of toying with reality is also found in new media sources. The interesting link here, to me, is that new media abstractions of reality often attract escapist tendencies in the human population. Is the city also a haven of escape, where reality does not have to be what it 'really' is? This might lend to the lack of volunteerism that cities seem to have. On the 'up' side, the abstraction of reality also has a marketable potential, so abstractions can make markets bloom. As an artist, it is easy to get caught up in thought or abstraction when working. But such abstractions can only be truly enjoyed, and propelled when it is balanced with what truly is the 'reality' of existence.

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